Market Brief: May 20, 2020

Comparable sales climbed 10.8% in the quarter, and, as we’ve seen with other retailers, average basket size jumped 12.5%, as shoppers chose to make less frequent, bigger trips. Digital comparable sales soared 141%, making up nearly 10 percentage points of the quarter’s comparable sales growth. Same-day delivery was up 278%.

Overall comparable sales climbed 11.2% during the quarter, while comparable sales in its U.S. home-improvement category climbed 12.3%. The company said website orders surged 80%. Rival Home Depot reported earnings on Tuesday, and although its same-store sales surged, it missed earnings estimates largely because of Covid-19-related expenses.

Comparable sales for the company’s main retail segment slipped 28%: Given its focus on apparel and accessories, and its presence in some malls, Urban Outfitters wasn’t able to stay open during the crisis. While digital sales were up double digits, it wasn’t enough to offset the losses from forced closures.

Minutes from the April 28-29 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee—the Fed’s policy-setting arm—highlight ongoing cloudiness over the economic outlook. “Uncertainty regarding the economic effects of the coronavirus outbreak was extremely elevated,” the minutes say, adding that the historical behavior of the U.S. economy in response to past economic shocks provides limited guidance for making judgments about how the economy might evolve over coming quarters.

Facebook has dabbled in e-commerce before, but this time the company’s timing seems exactly right, with many small businesses either closed entirely or struggling to survive in the face of the Covid-19-related economic crisis. The move creates a new competitive front with Amazon.com and other online retailers, while also boosting the case for small businesses to buy advertising on the platform.

Google parent Alphabet and Apple announced the release of an API, short for application programming interface, for a so-called “Exposure Notifications System.” With the API, health agencies can begin launching apps that use the system to notify smartphone users when someone they’ve been in contact with has contracted Covid-19.

Luckin’s American depositary receipts were trading at $2.85 Wednesday morning, tumbling by 35% from their closing price of $4.39 on April 6 before trading was suspended by Nasdaq. Before the halt, shares had dropped 89% this year. The exchange has informed Luckin of its plan to delist the stock due to “public interest concerns” related to fabricated transactions disclosed by the company in its financial reports, as well as past failure to publicly disclose material information.

The study results published Wednesday in the science journal Nature lifted Inovio stock 8.2% to $15.76 near midday—echoing the enthusiasm that swept up shares of rival Moderna on Monday, when that company released an encouraging bit of data on the first eight Americans vaccinated in a Phase 1 clinical trial. That enthusiasm had a short half-life.

The move adds urgency to a question that investors have already begun to ask about other industry players: If oil companies don’t pay big dividends, what’s the point of owning their stocks? Absent more drastic industry restructuring, there isn’t a compelling case to buy most of them.

Royal Caribbean, the second-largest cruise operator, said it lost $6.91 a share in the first quarter, compared with per-share earnings of $1.31 a year earlier. That result includes a $1.1 billion impairment charge. On an adjusted basis, which excludes the impairment, the company lost $1.48 a share, versus earning $1.31 a share in the corresponding period last year. Revenue fell some 17% to about $2 billion.